There are some mornings I wake up to the sound of sirens, others to neighbours arguing, the dull thrum of traffic, or my phone buzzing before the kettle’s even boiled. City life is a constant hum—one I once found invigorating. But in recent years, it’s started to grate. Maybe it’s age, or burnout, or a quiet craving I can’t quite name. Either way, I’ve become obsessed with silence. Not the absence of sound, but the presence of something deeper—something you can only hear when everything else fades.
That craving has led me to some of the most remote corners of the world. Not the usual kind of escape, with poolside loungers and sunset cocktails, but places where the noise of the world—literal and metaphorical—can’t follow you. Places where silence isn’t just a lack of distraction, but a kind of presence. A teacher. A balm. A reset.
This is the story of three such places: a rainforest dripping with moss and mystery in the Pacific Northwest, a mountaintop monastery in Bhutan, and the frozen hush of Finnish Lapland. And what I found, as I wandered through them, was not emptiness—but a fullness I hadn’t realised I was missing.
Hoh Rainforest, Washington, USA
It took me half a day of driving from Seattle to reach the Hoh, and the last few miles felt like slipping through a green veil. Rain dripped steadily from moss-laden branches. The air was thick, sweet with damp earth and decay. Somewhere in the canopy, an owl stirred. But mostly, it was quiet. Not silent like a recording studio—this was living silence, breathing silence. A kind of natural hush that makes you feel small in the best possible way.
They say the Hoh is one of the quietest places on Earth. There’s even a spot, marked by a small red stone, that acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton dubbed the “One Square Inch of Silence.” I sat there for an hour, listening. Not just hearing, but really listening. To the slow creak of trees. The distant croak of a raven. My own heartbeat.
In that silence, the world outside—the deadlines, the headlines, the to-do lists—fell away. All that remained was breath, bark, leaf, rain.
Bhutan’s Mountain Monasteries
Bhutan isn’t just quiet. It’s contemplative. The air seems to carry a kind of reverence, as if the mountains themselves are meditating. I arrived in Paro on a clear morning, and by the end of the day, I was winding my way toward the cliffside wonder that is Paro Taktsang, or the Tiger’s Nest Monastery.
To get there, you hike through pine forests and clouds. The silence is only interrupted by the occasional flutter of prayer flags or the rustle of a monk’s robe. At the top, perched like a dream above the valley, is the monastery itself—a series of rooms and corridors built into the rock, full of butter-lamp glow and ancient chants.
I spent two days in a guesthouse nearby, rising before dawn to sit in stillness with the monks. We didn’t speak much. We didn’t need to. The silence was generous, expansive. It made room for reflection, for grief I hadn’t processed, for joy I’d forgotten how to feel. I didn’t find enlightenment. But I did find a kind of inner spaciousness I’d been missing for years.
Finnish Lapland in Winter
If the Hoh was lush and humming, and Bhutan was serene and sacred, Finnish Lapland in the dead of winter was sheer, white emptiness. I arrived in the town of Inari just as the sun was setting—which, in January, happens at about 2pm. I strapped on snowshoes and followed a local Sámi guide across a frozen lake, our only light the moon and the northern lights teasing the horizon.
The snow swallowed sound. No birds. No wind. No traffic. Just the crunch of my boots and my breath, fogging in the cold. The guide gestured for me to lie back on the snow, and I did, staring up at the aurora flickering above like some celestial orchestra playing in silence.
In Lapland, silence isn’t spiritual or ecological—it’s elemental. It wraps around you like a blanket, thick and absolute. It makes you listen inward. I thought I’d be lonely. I wasn’t. I felt… accompanied. By the snow. By the stars. By the sheer majesty of the void.
What Silence Teaches
People often ask why I go to such remote places. Why I choose silence over spectacle. But silence is the spectacle. In a world engineered to grab your attention—through apps, headlines, marketing, chaos—choosing quiet is almost revolutionary.
In these three places, I found different kinds of silence: lush, sacred, stark. And each one whispered something I hadn’t heard before. That presence doesn’t require noise. That meaning doesn’t demand words. That we don’t always need to do—sometimes, it’s enough just to be.
And maybe most of all: that the quietest places on Earth aren’t empty at all. They’re full—of insight, of wonder, of everything we’ve been too distracted to notice.
By Eliza Wren for Going Global
